Tomichan Matheikal's blog

After food and shelter, man’s basic need is story.  I read this a few days back in The Hindu , but have forgotten who said it.   Stories fascinate us.  Most of the great lessons of life were taught to us in the form of stories when we were children.  The life of each one of us is a bundle of stories, stories we tell us about ourselves as well as those told by others about us.  These stories create our reality to the extent they determine our perceptions and feelings, and hence our actions.  In our stories, we may see ourselves as the hero, the victim, the villain, or anything.  Our life is completely influenced by these roles we assume.  Consequently, if we wish to make changes in our life, it is necessary to make changes in the story we script for ourselves. In psychology, there is a whole therapeutic process known as Narrative Therapy .  According to Michael White, a theorist and practitioner of Narrative Therapy, we construct the meaning of life in interpretive stori

Meditation I started this journey at some point in the pointless flow of eternity.  As purposelessly as the motion of a stone set rolling down a mountain by the insensate boot of a careless traveller. Unlike the stone, I have a lot of freedom to choose my path, the mode of my travel, the diversions and digressions.  I can choose the people I want to meet, or at least my responses to them.  I can laugh or brood.  Laughter will not necessarily generate flowers on my way.  Flowers are not necessarily more desirable than brambles. Why do I have to make this journey at all?  The May fly which has no mouth answered.  “I live just a few hours,” said the May fly which had no mouth.  “When I become an adult, I mate with another adult.  Then I die.  She lays eggs and she dies.  The eggs hatch.  More May flies are born.  Only to mate and die.”  And the May fly which had no mouth died. I learnt that the May flies never eat any food.  They have neither a mouth nor a stomach.  Fo

Parable Manav was arrested and thrown into a dark dungeon.  No one told him what his crime was.  When they hurled him into the dark cell whose door shut with a bang, all that he could see was a beam of light passing through a slit-like ventilator at the top of one of the walls.  Silence and darkness enveloped him. He stretched his body and touched the narrow sill of the ventilator.  He pulled himself up and looked out through the ventilator.  The light outside helped dispel some of his gloom.  He spent most of his time and energy doing the same thing day after day, without once caring to explore the darkness in the cell.  If only he had explored the darkness, he would have discovered that the door was not locked. What stood between him and his freedom was his obstinate clinging to the narrow slit. Acknowledgement : This parable is adapted from Sheldon B. Kopp’s book, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!

“The poor are poor not because the rich are rich,” says Robert J. Samuelson in his Washington Post column reproduced in The Hindu .  In 1968, the sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the phrase ‘the Mathew Effect’ for the phenomenon of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.  The name Mathew came from the Bible.  Jesus said, according to Mathew’s gospel, “For to him who has more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” [Mathew 13:12].  Jesus did not live in a time which promoted capitalism and its wealth-creating ideology.  Jesus was far, far from being a capitalist.  In fact, he would have been the ideal communist, had he been allowed to have his way by the various leaders of his time (political as well as religious).  What he meant was that those who have the spirit of life in them will be given more of that, and those who are just bullshit will get lost. But religious scriptures can be

Fiction Father Joseph woke up from sleep with a tremor running down his spine.  His body was drenched with sweat.  This had become a routine now: a nightmare would kill his sleep halfway through it. In his nightmares he was a sorcerer, or a witch hunter, or a medieval knight tilting at some mysterious windmills.  He dispensed magical potions and panaceas to the people who came and knelt down in front of him with childlike trust.  He drove a stake into the heart of every sinner in the parish.  He led some amorphous army to he knew not where.  Every dream ended with somebody like John the Baptist making a mocking apparition to him and accusing him of cardinal sins of all hues.  Often the Baptist had only the head; there was no body.  There was fury in his mockery.  His words lashed out like lightning and thunder.  Father Joseph put on his white soutane as he got ready for his morning meditation.  He spent an hour every morning in silent prayer and meditation before the pa

The tagline of Quickfix adhesive in the 1970s was “Joins everything except broken hearts”.   At about the same time, a therapeutic process known as Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) was gaining ground in psychology. It sought to help people arrive at quick solutions to psychological problems since everyone was too busy to go digging into the past and thus arrive at radical solutions.   The advocates of SFBT argue that it is not necessary to know the cause of a problem to solve it and that there is no necessary relationship between the causes of problems and their solutions.   The problem is not what matters, but the solution.   Searching for the “right” solution is as futile as seeking to know and understand the problem.   What is important is to know your goals, what you want to accomplish, rather than diagnosis of the problem and its history. The fundamental assumption of SFBT is that people are healthy and competent and have the ability to construct solutions

Fiction Kundan was returning home after his monthly entertainment of a night show in the city.  It was past midnight and the heavy downpour had put out the street lamps on the village road.  But Kundan knew the road like the back of his palm and so neither the pitch darkness nor the battering rain slowed him down.  He was about to leave the road and enter the mud path through his farm when he felt the touch of cold steel on his temple.  “Keep your trap shut, else you won’t open it ever again,” said a voice which was horribly rough but perfect in pronunciation.  In the flash of a lightening Kundan saw that the burly figure that was holding a pistol against his temple.  The figure was wearing a western suit, complete with the blazer and a tie.  His suit was drenched in the rain in spite of the enormous parasol he was holding with one hand.  “I’m your boss from now on,” Kundan heard the steely voice.  “You’ll obey my orders and be at my beck and call.” Kundan, not knowin